When Maggy re-entered the drawing room her eyes were suspiciously red. She seemed anxious to get away. She put her arms round Alexandra and hugged her. "Good-by, Lexie," she said breathlessly. "Don’t forget me. The best of luck. Mrs. Lambert’s an angel. T-tell her so—from me." She tore herself away, pulled down her veil, and was gone, leaving Alexandra bewildered. Maggy stopped at a jeweler’s on her way home. Taking off her bracelet, she handed it to the man behind the counter. "Don’t bother to tell me what it’s worth. Just say whether it’s real or sham," she said. It was sham. She dropped it into her bag and went out, with a new pain gripping at her heart. She never wore the bracelet again. After dinner that evening Woolf remarked its absence. She had worn it ever since he had given it to her. "Where’s your bracelet?" he inquired. "I hope you haven’t left it about or had it stolen." "Fred," she said, looking him steadily in the eyes, "I found out quite by accident that it isn’t real. Wait a minute. Let me finish. You know I don’t care tuppence about the value of anything you give me. It isn’t the cost I think of. If you’d given me a ring out of a penny cracker I wouldn’t have changed it for another from somebody else a million times its value. But don’t sham to me. I—I can’t bear it." "I never told you they were real diamonds," he rejoined in a nettled voice. "If I didn’t say they were paste you ought to have guessed it. Anyhow, the bracelet cost me twenty pounds. Genuine stones that size would have run to the price of a damn good race horse." He gave her a disparaging look. "Why, all in, you don’t cost me as much as one of the animals I’ve got in training." The words froze her. She stared at him in dumb agony. "Oh, my heart!" she cried, with a sudden catch at her breath. He sat still, coldly indifferent. "And I’ve given it to you!" she presently whispered. XX Alexandra’s longing to act, to appear before an impartial audience in a play reflecting every-day life, was at last satisfied when the tour began. Her part was a very small one, that of a parlormaid only, but it did not prevent her going through the usual phases of stage fright at the first performance. On the second night she was calm and collected. At the end of a week it surprised her to find that she was no longer under the spell of theatricalism. Had she joined the company in the ordinary way the glamour of the stage would have got hold of her and remained with her for a long time. As an insignificant member of it, out of touch with its leading light, she would have imagined mysteries where none existed. But from the very first all these so-called mysteries were exposed. She was like the assistant to the conjuror: she saw how things were done.